Original post can be found at It-Eye

Java 7 was released, so I gave it a spin to see what kind of improvements were made. While testing some new features I went online to look for not so obvious changes as well. Here is a short list of the new features and improvements in Java 7.

• Strings in switch
• try-with-resources statement
• More precise rethrow
• Multi-catch
• Binary integral literals
• Underscores in numeric literals
• Improved type inference for generic instance creation
• More new I/O APIs for the Java platform (NIO.2)
• Support for dynamic languages
• Better multicore and parallelism support

The list is not that big but still it has some handy improvements. Looking at the list it struck me: How long have I been using Java 6? Looking at the table below you can see that Java has been updated every year or two but the gap between Java 6 and 7 is five years.

Time does not tell the whole story but looking at the time frame of five years it took to release Java 7 and the feature/improvement list it makes me say “This is it?” Sure Java 6 has been updated a lot but still it doesn’t fit. We all talk about Agile, iterative development and try to convince people how it improves software but when we need to improve a programming language we throw everything over board. But not all is lost, if you look at the table you can see that Java 8 is scheduled for 2012. So let me be optimistic and believe that this was just a hick up in the Java improvement process.

I am looking forward to Java 8.